It's really more that Cadence uses Skill as the extension language for the IC design tools it has - their simulation scripting language is based on Skill. I've built quite a few tools with Cadence Skill, including my current favorite which transforms a simulation script that normally runs on one computer (and dependent on various paths etc. on that computer) into one which can run within a single directory on a target computer - a feat made almost trivial by Lisp-like languages. The major difficulty was with dynamically generated filenames, but all I needed to do is add a table-lookup function around each file reference argument.
I liked Skill and through it studied Lisp quite a bit. Sometimes I use Skill to generate Verilog code ^^, and I model state machines as:
We could even conceptually model individual states as functions (as per lambda the ultimate goto), with inputs as functions (probably querying from the user) and outputs as displaying the output; it would thus be possible to write, at the very least, a state machine simulator in Skill, which would include a method of transforming the state machine into Verilog.
